For Males, Video Game Rewards Are All in the Mind – washingtonpost.com

New research from Stanford scientists shows that the part of the brain associated with reward and addiction was more activated in males than in females when both genders played a game whose object was to acquire more territory.

There were relatively few areas of criticism of my book A Theory of Fun. One of them, however, was that it was sexist, in large part because I suggested that many of the core characteristics of most games were things that cognitively biased them towards systematizing minds (to use Simon Baron-Cohen’s term) — which statistically, biases them towards males.

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Project Horseshoe 2007’s report has been posted, and like last year, it’s full of game designy goodness. 🙂

If you are hankering for some Shadow of Yserbius action, looks like innrevival might have your fix.

The goal of the project is to create a server architecture that is compatible with the ImagiNation Network client software that you may still have lying around somewhere, forgotten, on a stack of floppies or a CD-ROM. This goal is being pursued by reverse-engineering the client software to determine the network messaging protocol that was used. We have had great success with this process so far, and by watching this site regularly for updates you will be able to keep up with our further progress and see what we have already done.

Looks like you will need to run an original client within DOSBox, but they have shots of a bunch of working pieces already — Boogers, 3d Golf, the Clubhouse…